The technical field of this invention is clothing manufacture and, in particular, assembly of clothing from patterned fabric.
Garments have long been made by joining two or more panels of limp fabric to form seams, so that the composite surface of the joined panels forms a desired three dimensional contour. Typically, the design process for a garment includes the step of segmentation of the desired finished contour into planar patterns having shapes corresponding to panels for the garment. These patterns are used to generate the panels which may be cut from a portion of a limp fabric while that portion is positioned in a plane.
In many instances, the assembly of a piece of clothing from numerous panels can be difficult, tedious and prone to error. For home seamstresses, the need to cut and keep track of numerous panels of fabric can be an arduous task. An improperly cut panel can be incorporated into the article and may go unnoticed until the final stages of assembly, resulting in an undesirable end item. Similarly, the joining of cut panels, particularly those of odd shapes, can often lead to mismatching of seams, mismatching of decorative patterns on the panels at the seams, or other mistakes in assembly. The result in each of these instances is the need to undo the assembly or start again with new panels.
Moreover, conventional assembly of seamed articles includes the steps of generating panels from patterns where the intended seam locations are determined by using predetermined offsets from the edges of the pre-cut panels. U.S. Pat. No. 4,462,118 discloses a method of making a garment utilizing such predetermined offsets, although that patent does disclose a flat plane sewing technique as well. However, it is the actual location of the seams which provide the desired degree of fit for a garment. Accordingly, errors in the location of edges of the conventional pre-cut panel techniques lead to corresponding errors in the eventual seam locations. These errors generally have two components; namely, edge matching errors (due to cutting errors and visual edge matching imperfections, and tactile skills of the article assembler) and seam set-back errors (due to visual and tactile accuracies of the assembler).
It is known to assemble a seamed article from a single strip of material so that intended adjacent panels and regions to be joined overlap, and then the seams are joined and the excess fabric is cut away (See U.S. Pat. No. 4,401,044), particularly in the context of an automated assembly system. There is no known technique which addresses the setting of a pattern in material for use in article assembly which does not include reference to the use of panel selvage boundary information generally, or particularly in the pre-cutting of panels, with selvage, for assembly
There exists a need for simpler methods of manufacturing seamed garments and other articles. Patterns which allow a seamstress to assemble precision fit articles with a minimum of preparatory steps, would satisfy a variety of needs in the clothing industry.